Lan Sheng, a very good Szechuan restaurant, opened in Wallington in March 2014, a few doors from
a Polish meat market.

Why Wallington? While there is no
Chinese community there, multi-ethnic
Paterson is nearby; and as executive
chef Steven Wan told me through an
interpreter, “Chinese people will drive
for good food.”
You don’t have to be Chinese to appreciate Lan Sheng. Its mother ship in
Manhattan earned one Michelin star in

2013 and one in 2014—only one other
Chinese restaurant earned a star in the
New York guide in those years. In 2012,
Wan, a native of Hunan province, was
working in a Hunan restaurant in New
York when he was hired as chef of Lan
Sheng New York, which had opened in

2009. Last year, Wan opened Lan Sheng
in Wallington. After all that, he is just 26.

Bendokas, 33, is Lithuanian on his
father’s side. “But my mother’s father
was from Avellino, outside Naples,” he
told me after my visits, “and that was
the side of my family I spent the most
time with.” After graduating from the
CIA in 2003, Bendokas made several
trips to Rome, fell in love with its contemporary cooking and opened Rezza
in April 2013, intending to bestow
Rome’s culinary riches on the local
Italian-American communities.

There was just one problem. “A
lot of people didn’t understand it,” he
said. “Like spaghetti carbonara. It’s
classic Roman, but in Rome they don’t
thicken it with cream, like they do
here; they use raw egg yolk. Am I going
to argue with them? No.” He took it
off the menu, along with braised tripe
and a few other Roman specialties that
weren’t selling.

After hearing dozens of requests
for chicken Francese, Bendokas put
it on the menu—“using real lemon
juice, not from a bottle.” Rezza’s menu
has an “Italian-American Specialties”
section. One of my guests spotted veal
parm. Declaring himself a devotee,
he ordered it. It came with a mound
of spaghetti in red sauce. Shortly
thereafter, his verdict was plain to see:
a clean plate.

His four Italian cheeses include gloriously pungent Tallegio; the five salumi
include imported cooked prosciutto;
the four verduri include Brussels
sprouts with bacon-like chunks of
guanciale; antipasti include wondrously tender braised octopus with sautéed
fingerling potatoes, fresh lemon juice
and big caper berries, stem and all.

In 2001, while a student at the CIA,
Bendokas externed at Serenade in
Chatham. He later worked there and in
New York. Rezza was formerly a Bensi,
an Italian chain. Bendokas’s father
sanded down one of the Bensi tables,
hand-distressed it and sealed the wood
with butcher block oil. The contractor followed suit with the rest. They
knocked down a wall, repainted, added
handsome retro lighting, some art, and
that’s about it. It’s enough.

Appetizers illustrate the chef’s accommodating straddle. There are crisp,
smoky, bacon-cured wings with blue
cheese dip; Buffalo wings; and grilled
or sautéed sausage. There’s also a fine
farro salad with roasted sunchokes,
apples, castelrosso cheese and winter squash. In an eggplant rollatini,
the rich ricotta and marinara did not
drown out the nutty flavor and plush
texture of the eggplant.

Salads, like the offbeat tricolore—
substituting three kinds of shredded
cabbage for the traditional radicchio,
arugula and endive—were fresh and
thoughtfully detailed. The tricolore, for
example, included apples, hazelnuts
and a bacon vinaigrette studded with
nuggets of dark, crunchy bacon.

Side dishes are a festival in themselves. Rosemary polenta; meatballs in
gravy; and sautéed escarole were each
classic and delicious. But the must-or-der are the punched potatoes. Red Bliss
potatoes are par-boiled, flattened on a
cutting board with a smack of the hand,
and pan fried in olive oil until dark
and crunchy outside, dreamy-creamy
inside. Out they go under a blanket of
caramelized onions and garlic-infused
olive oil.

The caserecci soak up the natural
juices in a marvelous sauce of braised
lamb and sweet cipollini onions.

The moistness of a cod Livornese,
zesty with tomato, onions, capers and
olives, showed the kitchen’s finesse
with fish. At $20 for a generous portion, it also exemplifies Rezza’s bang
for the buck. Pizzas, too, give good
value. Most cost $14 to $18 and come
in two shapes, 16-inch round or 12-by-

17-inch rectangular (which, Bendokas
says, is Roman style).

Rezza’s house-made cheesecake and
pannetone French toast with Nutella
are fine, but the most refined flavors
are found in the gelati from Il Labora-torio del Gelato on Manhattan’s Lower
East Side.

“We try to be a warm and friendly
neighborhood restaurant,” Bendokas
said. Rezza may not be the purely Roman candle Bendokas envisioned, but
it casts a very welcome light.